A longstanding problem with digital storage devices is managing the stored content. Computer users have adopted various techniques to describe the volumes of information that may be held on digital storage media such as floppy disks, tapes and optical disks. While small amounts of content stored on low capacity devices like floppy disks may be adequately manually labeled. As the capacity of storage media grows, so does the amount of information hosted on such digital storage repositories. As a result, management of the storage device and its content becomes even more difficult for computer users.
For example, conventional labeling and inspection techniques do not scale well, in that as the capacities of storage media grow, so do the problems of providing human-readable descriptions and meaningful labeling. At times when the storage media is accessible on a running computer system, that is, while the storage media can be considered in an “online” state, directory and search technologies provide one viable solution. However, a significant need to manage descriptive information about stored content also exists when in an offline state.
For example, as hard drive costs decrease, users are acquiring new hard drives faster than they are failing or being retired. However limits on drive cabinetry, power, cabling and controllers means that some of the storage devices need to remain in disconnected states until specifically needed. The growth of portable external drives also increases the amount of storage in disconnected states. As a result, there is a need to track the content of such drives when disconnected.
The need to determine what content is stored on a disconnected storage device is becoming more important with the rapidly expanding technology of hot-pluggable storage devices for computing systems. This was not as significant of an issue in the past, where many prior consumer drives interfaced via ATA or IDE standards, which required that such drives be connected or removed from the computer system only while the whole system is powered down. Thus, most users did not frequently exchange hard drives in their systems, but rather used tape, CD-ROM and DVD-ROM for maintaining large quantities of swappable content. However, contemporary technologies such as USB, 1394 and SCSI, as well as Serial ATA (SATA), have resulted much more in portable hard drives, in which ordinary computer consumers may have multiple hard drives that are regularly connected, disconnected and transported between multiple systems. Mountable media scenarios have been valuable for extending available capacities via exchangeable storage media.
Indeed, many computer users are now using mechanical hard drives as mobile repositories/portable media used among different computer system devices. There are many scenarios in which it is faster an/or otherwise preferable to physically transport high-capacity media, instead of transmitting the data. By way of example, one emerging PC-based use for hard drives is a Personal Video Recorder (PVR). With such technology, hard drives likely can be used in a manner that is similar to how videotape cassettes have been in the past, e.g., by moving the hard drives from one computer/television to another as needed.
In sum, the number of useful and important storage devices owned by computer users will continue to expand, meaning some will likely exist in a disconnected state until needed. Managing these offline devices will be more difficult and cumbersome. The power and time required to connect a storage device's communications interfaces and spin up a drive make it difficult to perform inspection to determine the content of an offline storage module. Further, it may not be possible to plug in a drive when the system is engaged with other activities such as capture, download or playback. Physically affixing a printed label is one technique used to track the content of a storage device, but this not only requires overt human operation, which is undesirable, but also such static labels need to be replaced as stored content changes, and/or are not large enough to contain the amount of information needed to fully identify the content of high capacity storage devices.
Moreover, when dealing with disconnected storage devices, content tracking is only one common issue. Elaborate high-capacity storage facilities are often assembled from multiple technologies and storage devices, whereby the system organizational meta-information around a storage device can be very complex. Information about collaborative configuration in RAID sets, partitioning, formats and hosted content needs to be carefully maintained in association with a storage device, because once the storage subsystem components are separated from the system, the configuration and organizational metadata may not be inherently or automatically available. If not adequately documented, it can be quite difficult or impossible for an administrator to discover configuration details needed to bring the data online again.
What is needed is an improved scalable and flexible way to maintain information about mechanical storage devices, including information about their associated content. The information should be able to be accessed even when the device is offline or in a low power configuration.